St. Maarten Is Still Striving to Recover from Its Worst Hurricane in a Century

Andrae Douglas repairs the roof of a restaurant in St. Maarten, where residents are still striving to recover from the devastation brought by Hurricane Irma.

Photograph by Loic Bryan

When Hurricane Irma struck the island of St. Maarten, in September,
winds of a hundred and eighty-two miles per hour ripped off sections of the
roof of the island’s new Princess Juliana International Airport. Workers
placed tarps over some missing portions of the roof but were told to
stop so that the airport could maximize its insurance claims. In the
next two weeks, Hurricanes Jose and Maria poured heavy rains onto the
damaged roof and flooded the rooms below. Mold began to grow on the
interior walls. In December, the terminal was declared a public-health
hazard.

I recently visited St. Maarten to report on the island’s recovery.
The airport’s main terminal building was shuttered and empty. The only
other passengers on the flight from Antigua were two builders from
England, who were on a volunteer mission to repair church roofs in the
region. A white event-style tent decorated with red and green streamers
served as the immigration area. Airport officials told me that the new
terminal, constructed at a cost of a hundred million dollars, was not
designed to withstand wind from a Category 5 hurricane. The airport saw seventy-six million dollars in damages and losses. (The officials denied that they instructed workers not to protect the main terminal’s roof, as a way to maximize insurance claims.)

All told,
Irma caused as much as three billion dollars in damage and losses. St.
Maarten’s tourism industry—its economic engine—is now anemic. The
mega-resorts that are the country’s largest employers remain closed.
Only twenty per cent of the country’s hotel rooms are available for use,
and many are occupied by aid workers and international contractors.

The storm, the strongest Atlantic hurricane since records were first
kept, in 1851, also upended local politics. Members of parliament
accused the island’s then Prime Minister, William Marlin, of botching
the recovery effort. Marlin lost
two no-confidence votes and was forced to resign. (Sint Maarten, a former Dutch colony that became a standalone country within the Kingdom in 2010, makes up the southern portion of an island that it shares with Saint-Martin, a territory of France.)

Marlin was criticized for rebuffing an offer of five hundred and fifty
million euros (six hundred and fifty million dollars at the time) of aid
from the Dutch, which was contingent on St. Maarten adding a second
Hague representative to the country’s anti-corruption body and
temporarily granting border control to the Netherlands. After Marlin’s
resignation, the interim government accepted the Dutch aid, but
residents said that the country’s government has failed to restore some
basic services.

This week, the opposition party, the United Democrats, won the most
votes in a snap parliamentary
election but was one seat short of forming a government. Turnout was the lowest
since the country gained independence, a sign of either frustration with
local leaders or the fact that many of the residents who fled St.
Maarten after the hurricane have yet to return.

Skip Shakely, a sixty-seven-year-old retiree from Ohio and a St. Maarten
resident, told me that the island’s politicians had served its people
poorly. “Before the hurricane, St. Maarten was a nice, friendly little
island. After the hurricane, the people are still the same. They want to
make this place go,” Shakely said. “The government, that’s the other
problem. Well, that’s the main problem, to be honest with you. Since
they got independence, in 2010, they just haven’t had the right people
in there.”

Five months after the storm, the Great Bay Beach Resort, one of the
island’s shuttered mega-properties, was deserted. When I walked into the
open-air lobby, a female security guard politely told me that I was not
allowed to see the rest of the hotel. Wires dangled from the ceiling,
and across the room a large section of the hotel’s zinc roof had caved
in. A pool, usually jammed with tourists, sat empty, while debris
covered the deck, which overlooked the tranquil waters of the Caribbean.

Raju Budhrani, the owner of a jewelry store in Great Bay, told me that
the hotel was initially left unattended after the storm and “ordinary
citizens took to looting.” He estimated that he lost a hundred and fifty
thousand dollars of inventory. “Young fellows entered and threatened the
security guards and tore the stores down and took whatever they wanted,”
he told me.

Patricia Zamore, a fifty-three-year-old gift-shop manager, who has
worked in Great Bay for nineteen years, wondered how the island’s
economy would recover. “You know, the hotel industry is where most of
the people work, and all the major hotels got damaged,” Zamore told me.
“Everybody’s going to realize we don’t have no jobs, and we need to find
but there’s no work.”

Shakely, the retiree from Ohio, lives on the western end of the island,
in Porto Cupecoy, a new development of luxury condominiums, restaurants,
and a marina which emerged from the storm virtually unscathed. The area,
usually bustling with tourists, was largely empty. Shakely said that he
first visited St. Maarten in 1999 and decided to retire there three
years ago. He told me that Irma shuttered three of his businesses and
estimated his losses at three-quarters of a million dollars.

Residents, public officials, and business owners also expressed
frustration with the government’s response to Irma. They said that the
failure to protect the airport was one in a series of missteps in the
months since the storm. (Airport officials defended their response to
the storm and said that passenger flights quickly resumed. They also
built a temporary new “departure pavilion,” a huge air-conditioned tent
for travellers, furnished with food kiosks and duty-free stores.)

In the weeks after the storm, the Dutch and
American governments, various airlines, and other N.G.O.s donated more than three
hundred thousand pounds of food, water, tarps, tents, and hygiene
products. Dutch Royal Marines took over the airport, which was first
built by the U.S. military, during the Second World War, and accepted
only military and relief flights for a month. Lorraine Talmi, the
president of the St. Maarten Hospitality and Trade Association, which
helped distribute aid across the island, said that damage to its
telecommunications system delayed the delivery of food and other aid.

Rolando Brison, the director of the government’s tourism department,
blamed the Ministry of Public Health, Social Development, and Labor for
failing to distribute aid quickly. “What happened, unfortunately, is
that it was not well coördinated by the ministry that had to handle
that,” Brison told me. “It was a bit of a drama, and the ball was
dropped. . . . We have to realize where we made mistakes.” The public-health
ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

Frustrated with the slow government response, residents and
small-business owners mounted their own recovery-and-rebuilding efforts.
Divina Mirpuri, a vegan chef, started a donation-based lunch program
that distributed more than eleven hundred free meals in the six weeks
after Irma. Andrae Douglas, a local entrepreneur and builder, frustrated
with the government’s failure to provide reconstruction materials,
promised to repair a hundred roofs for free.

In an interview outside a home that he was repairing, Douglas said that
he has refurbished twenty-eight roofs across the island so far. He uses
the money that he makes from paying customers and salvaged building
supplies to repair homes at no cost to owners. Douglas, who scribbles
roofing dimensions on his hand and is exacting when taking measurements,
pointed to homes in the distance. “Do you see all of that blue out
there?” he asked. “That’s all tarps.”

Douglas lives in a two-bedroom walkup apartment in Philipsburg, St.
Maarten’s capital, with his six-year-old daughter, Genesis. He led me up
a flight of stairs to an abandoned apartment that he was repairing for
free. An inch of water covered the floor, and holes dotted the roof and
walls. He and a friend were installing plywood, roofing felt, and
tarpaulin so that the family could return.

The damage to Douglas’s home was nearly identical. Parts of the roof had
been ripped off and still not repaired. He and his daughter lived in the
two rooms where the ceiling was still intact. After Irma, the mother of
Douglas’s children had fled, with their one-year-old son, to Aruba, where
she remained. “I know I have a kid and everything, and my roof still
leaks, but my heart goes out to people who are in worse condition, so I
go and help them,” he told me.

In Saunders, a nearby suburb, Douglas was cleaning and repairing the
battered home of Trudy Richardson, a sixty-three-year-old retiree. Like
many other residents, she does not have homeowner’s insurance.
Tarpaulins functioned as a makeshift roof over her bedroom, bathroom,
and living room. Douglas drained water from the tarps after rain storms
to prevent them from collapsing. Richardson told me that a
representative from the public-housing ministry visited her home once to
take measurements, and she never heard from them again. “Douglas called
me, and came here with his friends and cleaned up. Now it’s looking
good. If you came here in the beginning, you would have ran outside,”
she told me. “Oh, my God, what a disaster.”

This post has been updated to include a statement made after publication by airport officials regarding their efforts to protect the main terminal’s roof.

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